Williams caught 'off-guard' by Avery Johnson firing

“It caught me off-guard,” Williams said following the team’s shootaround Friday morning ahead of Friday night’s game against the Bobcats.Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. “He was coach of the month last month.

“We did struggle the last 13 games or so, but I felt like we have a great team, we had a great coach, we had some good wins, and we just needed to get back to playing the way we were playing in November and forget about the way we played in December. We had some good things going in practice and things we were working on, and it was just a matter of putting it together.”

The Nets were unable to put it together in time to save Johnson’s job, however, having dropped 10 of their 13 games this month. Much of the blame for that has fallen at the feet of Williams, who became the official face of the franchise’s first season in Brooklyn after his decision to re-sign with the Nets this summer as part of their massive re-tooling of their roster that cost more than $330 million dollars.

But while Williams insisted that he wasn’t included in any discussions prior to Johnson’s firing – something that both King and Johnson reiterated during separate press conferences Thursday afternoon – he admitted that his play on the court, which has been below everyone’s expectations, did play a role.

“Nobody asked me what they should have done with Avery, because if they’d asked me I would have said he needs to be our coach,” said Williams, who said he texted Johnson after hearing the news. “He was a big reason why I stayed here [this summer].

“That’s how things go nowadays. As soon as something happens, someone has to take the blame, and I guess that guy is me. I can’t fight everything that’s being said, I’m not going to try. I know my teammates have my back, and like I said, I wanted to be here with Coach Avery. I’ve said it many times that he was a big reason why I came back here.”

The decision to fire Johnson came less than two weeks after Williams questioned the team’s offense following a recent practice, something the star point guard said that he personally apologized to Johnson for doing, saying he didn’t intend it to be a criticism of his now former coach.

But the offense doesn’t explain away the larger issues that have plagued Williams’ play this season, and his shooting in particular. After signing a five-year contract worth near $100 million this summer, Williams is averaging 16.6 points and 8.0 assists while shooting just 39 percent from the field overall and 29 percent from 3-point range.

“Nobody feels worse about the way I’ve been playing than me,” he said. “Every day I go home, I’ve just been trying to figure out how to get it going, play like I’m used to playing and like I used to play, and it just hasn’t clicked yet.

We were locked in some kind of science fiction time warp, where the same things kept happening over and over and nothing seemed to move forward. Was there really a 2012 or was it just a replay of 2011 and 2010? Had the Government actually changed, or was that just a Dallas-style dream sequence? Had all the pain already endured led us anywhere or was it just déjà vu all over again?

In 2012 Ireland’s patron saint was Sisyphus. The arrogant and powerful ruler of Corinth was punished by the gods in a peculiarly sadistic way, forced to push a heavy boulder up a steep hill all day and then watch as it rolled back down so that he could begin the toilsome task anew. Most Irish people know how he felt. So far €28 billion has been taken out of the economy but after all the pain the cost of servicing the State’s debts will keep spiralling upwards: from €6.2 billion in 2012 to €9.3 billion in 2013 and €9.7 billion in 2014. It’s not just that the boulder keeps rolling back down the hill, but that it’s getting heavier.

It’s not that events in 2012 lacked a certain humour. The European Central Bank began the year by “celebrating” the 10th anniversary of the euro, which was pretty funny. (The official video featured scenes of people queuing up at balloon-bedecked ATMs at midnight on January 1st,Quickparts builds injection molds using aluminum or steel to meet your program. 2002, to get hold of the new notes and wave them joyfully in the air. They had the wide-eyed look of baby seals who can’t see the club behind the hunter’s back.) In a gay sally, the Taoiseach told the world economic forum in Davos later that month that the crash happened because Irish people “went mad borrowing”, shortly after he’d told the same Irish people that the crisis “is not your fault”. He also, wittily, told an unemployed man in Mullingar in May to “get a job”.High quality stone mosaic tiles. Bertie Ahern declared himself the victim of a “grave injustice” when the Mahon tribunal found that he had been on the take. Minister for Health James Reilly showed his solidarity with the debt-ridden masses by making a personal appearance in Stubbs Gazette. You had to laugh.

In 2009 the Department of Finance, in what seemed at the time a gloomy forecast, looked forward to 2012. There would, it suggested, be growth of just 4 per cent in GNP, and investment would rise by a very modest 9 per cent. Unemployment would be falling steadily but slowly. Oh,The oreck XL professional air purifier, and net central-government debt would be 79 per cent of GDP in 2012.

This wasn’t a happy prospect, but it was the story that made sense of all the bad things that were happening back then: we were going to have a rough few years but things would then start to get better. We wouldn’t be anywhere near the pig’s back in 2012, but we’d at least be able to smell the bacon. A sober, modest kind of recovery would be the reward for all the money we were pouring into the banks and all the cuts and all the tax rises. By 2012 we’d be a chastened but hopeful lot, looking back on a hard few years but forward to a reasonably decent prospect.

By now, of course, that sober forecast looks deliriously, fantastically optimistic. In the real 2012, growth in GNP was 1 per cent, not 4 per cent. Investment didn’t rise by 9 per cent. It fell by 4 per cent.

Unemployment wasn’t falling significantly: about 350,000 workers had disappeared from the Irish economy since 2007. Government debt isn’t 79 per cent of GDP, but more like 120 per cent. It would actually be very nice if things were only as bad as they were predicted to be three years ago.

The best that could be said for 2012 is that it brought some clarity. Two big illusions were shattered. One was the idea that it was somehow possible to keep taking money out of the economy and, at the same time, to have a sustained economic recovery. This notion had some superficial plausibility because, on the face of it, this is what happened during the last great recession, in the late 1980s. Back then, the government cut spending rapidly, and somehow the economy began to grow steadily before shifting into overdrive in the mid-1990s.Klaus Multiparking is an industry leader in innovative parking system technology.